Needless to say these ramblings are personal reflections and do not in any way represent official policy of the Fédération Protestante de France, my employer, nor of the churches I'm a minister of, the United Reformed Church and the Eglise Réformée de France.

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2008 was the international year of languages, the international year of the potato and the year for the protection of the frog. 2009 is the international year of reconciliaiton, the international year of astronomy, the Calvin year, the St Paul year and no doubt much more besides. Enjoy it all.2010 was the UN year of biodiversity and the year of the 100th anniversary of the Edinburgh mission conference2011 is the international year of forests - protect the trees and plant some folks!

Monday, 7 March 2011

All last week at morning prayer we remembered the Bible. From Tuesday to Friday we had no Bible reading but rather we worked with the stories of the Bible that we actually already know in our hearts and heads, written with the words of our memories, with our feelings and more besides.

After we had done a bit of remembering we went off and looked at one or other of the wonderful textiles hanging in the chapel as part of our Stitching Peace exhibition.We began with the calming of the storm and Christ walking on the water, we ended with the woman who annointed Jesus with perfume "In memory of her". We also remembered the 10 plagues of Israel and the healing of the woman bent double.

It was interesting that we never really did get around to trying to list the 10 plagues but instead we got "side-tracked" by one person saying, "the thing that always struck me was Pharaoh's stubborness". We were looking at an "arpillera" made at the time of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and very present in our minds were the images and news from Libya. The plagues the people suffer as the result of one person's intransigence - how much time does it take to understand, what kind of macho posturing is this that takes no account of the human cost of confrontation?

It was wonderful to remember the Bible, it felt like stolen time somehow - early in the morning subversive prayer. It was fun and good and powerful - and interestingly days later now I can still remember all of the readings. If we had read the passages I suspect that might not be the case.

1 Comment:

I suspect you are right - oral memory reinforces like things read out do not seem to have the same effect. Trying to find ways of encouragingoral memory here - had a great drama of 'Jesus meets the devil' from two students over the last couple of days (one14, one 18)- which they have worked on themselves - and which everyone is now talking about.

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About Me

Jane

My name is Jane Stranz. I was born and brought up in Britain and am an ordained minister of the United Reformed Church, a small non-conformist church. For over 10 years I worked as a parish minister in the Eglise Réformée de France in Dunkerque, Chambéry and Ferney-Voltaire. Fom July 2002 to October 2011 I led the language service of the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Currently I'm working on a two year mission on ecumenical relations, inter-religious dialogue and inter-cultural ministry with the Fédération Protestante de France based in Paris. It's going to be exciting and a steep learning curve. I'm married to Stephen Brown a journalist, researcher and theologian who works at Gobethics.net. Over the next two years we'll see how we manage a commuting marriage between Paris and Ferney Voltaire. Since 1999 I've been living with multiple sclerosis, sounds rather noble but really means I just live in denial and inject interferon b three times a week and count myself very lucky to live in a country with a great health care system.